Futurist Ray Kurzweil optimistically predicts much longer life expectancies, cures for cancer and heart disease, flying cars and robot butlers.

Humans will become capable of feats that now seem impossible — for many of us, in our lifetime — in large part due to expected advances in brain research, posits the inventor and author in his new book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human… read more

Kurzweil’s book on how to create a mind is sure to bring some new spin, as well as plenty of debate to a highly controversial topic. Many claim that the human brain is too complex and too mysterious to be understood or replicated within our lifetimes, if ever.

Others (many who regularly read this site!) on the other hand, recognize that technologies such as Siri and… read more

A pioneering developer of optical character recognition and text-to-speech software explores the possibility of creating a synthetic neocortex that could surpass the human mind.

Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, 2005, etc.) bases his prediction on modern insights into how the brain has evolved a hierarchical pattern-recognition structure. We perceive the bare outline of events and reconstruct memories in an ordered sequence, and… read more